MANILA, Philippines - A road, according to the dictionary, “is a long stretch with a smoothed or paved surface, made for traveling by motor vehicle, etc.”
But to a big number of rice farmers in Nueva Ecija and elsewhere in the country, roads are not for motor vehicles alone but also for drying their palay during harvest season.
“We have no recourse but to dry our palay on the roads because we do not have any drying facility. What makes it more difficult for us to dry our harvest is the lack of wide and long cemented roads in our municipality,” the farmers said.
They admitted during an interview that the palay that they dry on roadsides are a road-block or an obstruction as it hinders traffic. However, they said they are forced to resort to this because there are not enough facilities available.
According to the Bureau of Postharvest Research and Extension (BPRE), during the drying operation alone, 4.5 percent of palay harvest is lost due to inadequate or inefficient drying facilities or a loss of 408,764 metric tons (MT) of milled rice.
Ricardo Cachuela, BPRE executive director, said palay farmers will be saving millions of pesos every year if they used efficient drying facilities.
Studies show that as much as P10 billion is lost due to lack of such facilities.
Arnel Ramir Apaga, director of the agency’s training and extension department, said BPRE has distributed 588 flat bed dryers to qualified irrigators’ associations and farmers organizations all over the country in coordination with the Department of Agriculture’s regional field units.
He said the program is aimed at uplifting the well-being of the farmers by helping them reduce the drying losses in rice and, at the same time, crafting guidelines and action plans for the conduct of post-harvest research.
A former official of the National Food Authority (NFA) said from the time palay is harvested to the time rice is sold to the public, almost 18 million cavans of rice are being wasted annually.
Even in the matter of eating, he said, so much rice is actually wasted. “When you go to a restaurant, you will not fail to notice that almost everyone leaves a morsel of rice on his plate after eating. This can be attributed to the lack of awareness of the importance of rice conservation.”